New York Times Co. to Offer Buyouts to Employees

In a bid to continue aggressive digital expansion while controlling costs, The New York Times will offer voluntary buyout packages to members of the newsroom and several business departments at the end of the month, the company announced on Wednesday.

Members of The Times’s executive committee, including Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Dean Baquet, its executive editor, said in a memo to employees that the buyouts were a part of the company’s larger mandate to build a more digitally focused newsroom and to reach its stated goal of doubling digital revenue by the year 2020.

“These plans will no doubt lead to new initiatives and investments,” the memo said. “At the same time, we will also need to make tough decisions about what to stop doing. Wherever we can reduce costs without damaging the values, and value, of Times journalism, we will do so.”

In an interview, Mr. Baquet characterized the buyouts as “a big step toward building The New York Times of the future.” He said The Times was not planning layoffs this year but would take other measures to cut costs in some areas and dedicate resources to other areas.

“I don’t want to speculate about next year,” he said, addressing layoffs, “other than to say I’ve made it very clear the newsroom has to be somewhat smaller. Not radically smaller, but somewhat smaller.”

Mr. Baquet also emphasized that The Times’s news operation, which employs 1,300 people, would need to shift to accommodate more people with skills in visual journalism and more people from diverse backgrounds, while continuing its focus on deep reporting.

“One of the goals of journalism is to play the world back to itself,” he said. “You can’t do that if you don’t look a little bit more like the world than we do.”

Since January, company leaders have sent more than 10 memos detailing aggressive efforts to reshape both the print and digital editions of the operation, including building a print-focused news hub, investing in Facebook Live, expanding internationally and beginning a Spanish-language edition.

It is a time of upheaval in the news industry after a period of ambitious growth. As media companies struggle to compensate for plummeting advertising revenue while chasing new technologies, like virtual reality, layoffs and revamping plans have become the norm. On Tuesday, Vice Media announced that it would lay off more than a dozen employees, and a string of reorganization efforts have been undertaken at other outlets, including Mashable and The Guardian.

The announcement on Wednesday did not specify the number of buyouts that would be offered, but it said packages would be distributed electronically to all eligible employees on May 31, who would then have until mid-July to consider the offer.

As with previous buyouts, the company can accept or deny buyout applications.

The Times is negotiating with the NewsGuild on a new contract, and both are still working out the final terms of the buyout offer.

“This buyout offers an excellent opportunity for some employees to leave on their own terms,” Grant Glickson, the chairman of the Guild unit at The Times, said in an email.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Times Co. to Offer Buyouts in News and Business Units. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe